Michael L. Berumen

Jun Chen, Ming Hu, Darren J. Coker et al. · mit

Monitoring animal behavior can facilitate conservation efforts by providing key insights into wildlife health, population status, and ecosystem function. Automatic recognition of animals and their behaviors is critical for capitalizing on the large unlabeled datasets generated by modern video devices and for accelerating monitoring efforts at scale. However, the development of automated recognition systems is currently hindered by a lack of appropriately labeled datasets. Existing video datasets 1) do not classify animals according to established biological taxonomies; 2) are too small to facilitate large-scale behavioral studies and are often limited to a single species; and 3) do not feature temporally localized annotations and therefore do not facilitate localization of targeted behaviors within longer video sequences. Thus, we propose MammalNet, a new large-scale animal behavior dataset with taxonomy-guided annotations of mammals and their common behaviors. MammalNet contains over 18K videos totaling 539 hours, which is ~10 times larger than the largest existing animal behavior dataset. It covers 17 orders, 69 families, and 173 mammal categories for animal categorization and captures 12 high-level animal behaviors that received focus in previous animal behavior studies. We establish three benchmarks on MammalNet: standard animal and behavior recognition, compositional low-shot animal and behavior recognition, and behavior detection. Our dataset and code have been made available at: https://mammal-net.github.io.

Faizan Farooq Khan, Yousef Radwan, Eslam Abdelrahman et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive cross-domain capabilities, yet their proficiency in specialized scientific fields like marine biology remains underexplored. In this work, we systematically evaluate state-of-the-art MLLMs and reveal significant limitations in their ability to perform fine-grained recognition of fish species, with the best open-source models achieving less than 10\% accuracy. This task is critical for monitoring marine ecosystems under anthropogenic pressure. To address this gap and investigate whether these failures stem from a lack of domain knowledge, we introduce FishNet++, a large-scale, multimodal benchmark. FishNet++ significantly extends existing resources with 35,133 textual descriptions for multimodal learning, 706,426 key-point annotations for morphological studies, and 119,399 bounding boxes for detection. By providing this comprehensive suite of annotations, our work facilitates the development and evaluation of specialized vision-language models capable of advancing aquatic science.

Fahad Aljehani, Ibrahima N'Doye, Micaela S. Justo et al.

Successful aquaculture systems can reduce the pressure and help secure the most diverse and productive Red Sea coral reef ecosystem to maintain a healthy and functional ecosystem within a sustainable blue economy. Interestingly, recirculating aquaculture systems are currently emerging in fish farm production practices. On the other hand, monitoring and detecting fish behaviors provide essential information on fish welfare and contribute to an intelligent production in global aquaculture. This work proposes an efficient approach to analyze the spatial distribution status and motion patterns of juvenile clownfish \textit{(Amphiprion bicinctus)} maintained in aquaria at three stocking densities (1, 5, and 10 individuals/aquarium). The estimated displacement is crucial in assessing the dispersion and velocity to express the clownfish's spatial distribution and movement behavior in a recirculating aquaculture system. Indeed, we aim to compute the velocity, magnitude, and turning angle using an optical flow method to assist aquaculturists in efficiently monitoring and identifying fish behavior. We test the system design on a database containing two days of video streams of juvenile clownfish maintained in aquaria. The proposed displacement estimation reveals good performance in measuring clownfish's motion and dispersion characteristics leading to assessing the potential signs of stress behaviors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique for quantifying variation in clownfish activity levels between recordings taken in the morning and afternoon at different stocking densities. It provides practical baseline support for online predicting and monitoring feeding behavior in ornamental fish aquaculture.